“The illustrious Lorenzo suffers so acutely that it is hard to understand how he can hold out,” reported the Ferrarese ambassador. On March 18, Lorenzo, though still ailing, felt well enough to travel to Careggi. This modest villa had been the scene of much joy and sorrow. It was here that Cosimo purchased for his friend Ficino a farm so that he could have the pleasure of the philosopher’s company while taking a break from business in the city. Careggi was also the starting point for Lorenzo’s memorable ride that August morning in 1466 when he barely escaped capture by the conspirators lying in wait for his father. And it was to Careggi that both Cosimo and Piero traveled when it was time to die. There is little doubt that Lorenzo was consciously retracing their final journey. Here among familiar fields and meadows he would end his days, removed from the crowds and commotion of the palace in the city.
Lorenzo was accompanied on this short trip by his sister Bianca. Soon Lucrezia and Piero hurried to their father’s side, accompanied by a few of Lorenzo’s closest friends. Always in the background in these final days were two or three distinguished physicians who rushed about trying desperately to appear useful. Lorenzo continued to follow their instructions faithfully (which in one case called for him to drink a concoction of pulverized pearls), more to keep up the spirits of his grieving companions than from any belief that they would delay the inevitable.
Calling Piero to his bedside he passed on such words of encouragement as he could, reassuring him that he was to be recognized as his successor but also urging him to “follow that course which appears to be most honorable” in order not to alienate those who put him into power. The ever faithful Poliziano described the final vigil in a letter written little more than a month after the fact, providing the only reliable account of Lorenzo’s last days. Most striking, perhaps, is how little thought Lorenzo seemed to give in his final hours to politics. Some months earlier he had told his friend that, should God spare him, he would dedicate the rest of his life to poetry, and it was with poets and scholars that he chose to surround himself in the little time that remained. “Pico came and sat by the bed,” Poliziano recalled,
while I leaned against his knees in order to hear the languid voice of my lord for the last time. With what goodness, with what courtesy, I may say with what caresses, Lorenzo received him. First he asked his pardon for thus disturbing him, begging him to regard it as a sign of the friendship—the love—he bore him, assuring him that he died more willingly after seeing so dear a friend. Then introducing, as was his wont, pleasant and familiar sayings, he joked also with us. “I wish,” he said to Pico, “that death had spared me until your library was complete.”
A more surprising visitor to Careggi was Girolamo Savonarola. Arriving shortly after Pico, he had apparently come at Lorenzo’s request. Some years later, one of the preacher’s followers—Fra Pacifico Cinozzi, who heard the story from Fra Silvestro, who in turn heard it from Savonarola—penned a dramatic narrative of the meeting. In this version, Lorenzo’s summons was the result of a guilty conscience:
Thus going to Careggi, where Lorenzo was, he entered and after a few words Lorenzo said he desired to make his confession. Fra Ieronimo [Savonarola] answered he was willing, but before hearing the confession he wished to mention three things, if these were acceded to no doubt whatever his salvation was assured. Lorenzo replied he was willing and would do what was asked. The Father said: “Lorenzo, it is needful for you to have great faith,” and he answered: “Father, that I have.” Fra Ieronimo then added the second: “Also it is needful that you restore what has wrongfully been taken.” After reflecting for a while he answered: “Father, I will do so, or I will cause my heirs to do it if I cannot.” The Father then said: “It is needful for you to give back to the Republic the liberty of the city, and to see that she returns to her ancient state.” To these words he gave no reply. Thus the said Father departed without further confession.
The story quickly became incorporated into the mythology surrounding the Dominican martyr, but it was apparently an invention, either of Savonarola himself or his disciples. A more plausible, and contemporaneous, account was furnished by Poliziano. According the poet, the viaticum was administered by another priest before Savonarola’s arrival:
Towards midnight while he was quietly meditating [Lorenzo] was informed that the priest bearing the Holy Sacrament had arrived. Rousing himself he exclaimed, “It shall never be said that my Lord who created and saved me shall come to me—in my room—raise me, I beg of you, raise me quickly so that I may go and meet Him.” Saying this he raised himself as well as he could and, supported by his servants, advanced to meet the priest in the outer room. There crying he knelt down.
Having just received the sacrament, it is unlikely that Lorenzo sent for Savonarola just so he could repeat the process. It is also highly unlikely that Savonarola, whatever he thought of Lorenzo’s policies, would have denied a dying man last rites. Poliziano’s less dramatic telling, written only weeks after the fact, no doubt provides a more accurate picture of their final encounter:
To [Savonarola’s] exhortations to remain firm in his faith and to live in future, if God granted him life, free from crime, or if God so willed it to receive death willingly, Lorenzo answered that he was firm in his religion, that his life would always be guided by it, and that nothing could be sweeter to him than death, if such was the divine will. Fra Girolamo then turned to go when Lorenzo said: “Oh Father, before going deign to give me your benediction.” Bowing his head, immersed in piety and religion he repeated the words and the prayers of the friar, without paying any attention to the grief now openly shown of his attendants.
In Lorenzo’s final hours, evil portents and ominous signs abounded. The gardens of Careggi were populated by strange apparitions that chilled men’s hearts with their mournful groans. In the city below, two of the lions on public display that served as the republic’s mascots tore each other to death in their cages, while a bolt of lightning struck the Duomo, sending marble blocks crashing to the street below. When Lorenzo heard what had happened, he was reported to have sighed, “Alas! I shall die because [the stones] fell toward my house.”
On April 8, Lorenzo descended into his final illness. Still he did his best to keep up the spirits of those around him: “To the last he had such mastery over himself that he joked about his own death,” wrote Poliziano.
Thus when given something to eat and asked how he like it he replied: “As well as a dying man can like anything.” He embraced us all tenderly and humbly asked pardon if during his illness he had caused annoyance to any one. Then disposing himself to receive extreme unction he commended his soul to God. The Gospel containing the Passion of Christ was then read and he showed that he understood by moving his lips, or raising his languid eyes, or sometimes moving his fingers. Gazing upon a silver crucifix inlaid with precious stones and kissing it from time to time, he expired.
Later that night his body was carried in a solemn torchlight procession along the road to Florence and brought to the monastery of San Marco. The next day the citizens of Florence streamed through the monastery to bid farewell to their leader. On the evening of April 10, his coffin was carried the few blocks to the church of San Lorenzo, where in a quiet ceremony attended only by close friends and relatives he was lowered into the ground beside his brother, Giuliano, in the family chapel. In a mournful reprise of the symbolism that had attended his baptism forty-three years earlier, Lorenzo’s coffin was borne on the shoulders of the brothers of the Confraternity of the Magi.
As on those earlier occasions when the deaths of Cosimo and Piero had left the city in a state of uncertainty, Lorenzo’s passing meant a period of anxiety for the people of Florence. The uneasiness was all the more pronounced because Lorenzo had dominated the age as no Florentine before him. “This man, in the eyes of the world, was the most illustrious, the richest, the most stately, and the most renowned among men,” mourned the apothecary Luca Landucci. “Everyone declared that he ruled Italy;
and in very truth he was possessed of great wisdom, and all his undertakings prospered.”
Shortly after his death, the Signoria of Florence offered the official epitaph in the name of the people of Florence:
Whereas the foremost man of all this city, the lately deceased Lorenzo de’ Medici, did, during his whole life, neglect no opportunity of protecting, increasing, adorning and raising this city, but was always ready with counsel, authority, and painstaking in thought and deed; subordinated his personal interest to the advantage and benefit of the community; shrank from neither trouble nor danger for the good of the State and its freedom; and devoted to that object all his thoughts and powers, securing public order by excellent laws; by his presence brought a dangerous war to an end; regained the places lost in battle and took those belonging to the enemies; and whereas he furthermore, after the rare examples furnished by antiquity, for the safety of his fellow citizens and the freedom of his country gave himself up into his enemies’ power and, filled with love for his house, averted the general danger by drawing it all on his own head; whereas, finally, he omitted nothing that could tend to raise our reputation and enlarge our borders; it has seemed good to the Senate and the people of Florence, on the motion of the chief magistrate, to establish a public testimonial of gratitude to the memory of such a man, in order that virtue might not be unhonored among the Florentines, and that, in days to come, other citizens may be incited to serve the commonwealth with might and wisdom.
A more moving tribute, and more personal, was penned by the inconsolable Poliziano:
Who from perennial streams shall bring
Of gushing floods a ceaseless spring?
That through the day, in hopeless woe
And through the night my tears may flow….
As the sad nightingale complains,
I pour my anguish and my strains.
Ah, wretched, wretched, past relief;
Oh, grief beyond all other grief!
Raphael, Pope Leo X, Giovanni de’ Medici, with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi, 1517 (Art Resource)
EPILOGUE: THE SPIRIT IN THE RING
“That man’s life has been long enough for his own deathless fame, but too short for Italy. God grant that now he is dead that may not be attempted which was not ventured in his lifetime.”
—KING FERRANTE, ON THE DEATH OF LORENZO
IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING LORENZO’S DEATH, A STRANGE story began circulating among the citizens of Florence. “It was said,” a contemporary reported, “when this darkness descended upon Florence, that it was because of Lorenzo di Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici who had released a spirit that he had entrapped in a ring; which, it was said, he set free and this was what caused [the stones to fall from the cathedral]. This spirit, it was said, he had kept for many years in that ring; and he liberated it because at that time he was gravely ill.” Whether this spirit was malevolent or benign the story does not say, but the supernatural tale testifies to the long shadow cast by the man known as il Magnifico and vividly conveys the anxieties that inevitably crowded into the void left by his passing.
As news of his death spread, more prosaic, but equally powerful, eulogies were delivered by the great lords of Europe. “The peace of Italy is at an end!” cried Pope Innocent, and King Ferrante was hardly more sanguine: “That man’s life has been long enough for his own deathless fame, but too short for Italy. God grant that now he is dead that may not be attempted which was not ventured in his lifetime.”
What Ferrante feared was the long-anticipated invasion of the mighty armies of the French king that hung like Damocles’ sword over the collective heads of the Italian city-states. It was largely to avoid such a catastrophe that Lorenzo labored in the last decade of his life to preserve the peace of Italy, hoping thereby to deny an opening that the covetous king might exploit.* But the system of alliances he had cobbled together from proudly independent states could not long survive without him. Lorenzo was a master tactician, but he was unable to reverse centuries of historical development in which each locality jealously guarded its independence and fought its neighbors for supremacy. There were occasional hints in his writing of a grander vision in which an Italy united, at least culturally, under the lead of the city on the Arno would challenge the great nation states arising to the west, but political unification would have to wait until centuries of common oppression by foreigners forged a common sense of national identity. Lorenzo’s foreign policy was too dependent on his own personal qualities to lead to enduring peace.
Piero, known to history as “the Unfortunate,” inherited his father’s position but none of his qualities as a leader. Where Lorenzo had known how to stroke the egos and flatter the vanity of potential opponents, Piero managed to step on every toe and to alienate even his natural allies. It took less than two years for Piero, more interested in horse racing and fine clothes than affairs of state, to squander all the goodwill his father had amassed. Under normal circumstances he might have been granted more time to grow into his job, but under the pressure of events his shortcomings were immediately and cruelly exposed. Lorenzo had not been in his grave many months when the fragile system of alliances that he had put in place began to crumble.
Without the soothing hand of Lorenzo on their shoulders, the tension that always existed between Milan and Naples grew into open antagonism. The immediate cause of the conflict was Lodovico Sforza’s refusal to hand over the reins of power to the legitimate duke, his nephew GianGaleazzo, who also happened to be married to Ferrante’s granddaughter. Knowing his claim to the ducal throne would never be secure as long as the Neapolitan king continued to agitate on behalf of GianGaleazzo, Lodovico invited the French king to renew his family’s claim to the Neapolitan throne. Late in the summer of 1494, Charles VIII, overruling his more cautious advisors, led his sixty-thousand-strong army across the Alps. At first Piero tried to rally a coalition to challenge the French advance, but when this massive force, equipped with artillery the likes of which the puny Italian forces had never seen, swept all before it, he panicked and reversed course. In October, with the French bearing down on Florence, Piero rode out to Charles’s camp, hoping to forestall a siege of the city by throwing himself on the mercy of the king. Piero’s adventure is a classic example of drawing the wrong lessons from history. Hoping to repeat his father’s bold gambit of sailing to Naples, Piero made a fatal blunder. Without so much as a shot being fired in anger he conceded to the French all the republic’s most important fortresses, including Pietrasanta and Sarzana, which Lorenzo had won with such difficulty. Florence was left defenseless, a fact immediately grasped by the Pisans, who seized the opportunity to declare their own independence. Upon his return to Florence in early November, the entire city, instead of greeting him as a hero, rose up against the arrogant, foolish, and now treasonous Piero. Waiting only long enough for dark of night to cover his flight, Piero, along with his two brothers, Giovanni and Giuliano, snuck through the gates and fled the city.
Thus, ignominiously, ended the reign of the Medici in Florence after six decades in which they had ruled over the city in her years of greatest glory. It was not the end of the association of the Medici with Florence, but it was the end of that special relationship between the family and an independent republic that could count itself as one of the powers of Europe. Humiliated by the capitulation, galled by the loss of Pisa, and furious at the man who had allowed it to happen, the people of Florence plundered the palace on the Via Larga, dispersing the treasures amassed by generations of cultivated men. Some, like the statues of David and Judith by Donatello, were set up before the Palace of the Priors as symbols of the revived republic, while others were dispersed to the winds. On November 17, 1494, King Charles rode through the gates of the city accompanied by his army, his lance at rest, symbolizing the seizure of a conquered city.
The man to whom Florentines now turned in their moment of crisis was the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola. As surely as Lorenzo captured the co
nfident spirit of the Renaissance, Savonarola captured the troubled spirit of this age of anxiety. Someone of Savonarola’s messianic outlook could flourish only in unsettled times, and as Italy became the battleground for the great powers of Europe, frightened men and women turned in ever greater numbers to the preacher who seemed to have foretold their woes. In fact, Savonarola welcomed the humiliation and trauma of the French invasion. It was he who rode out to Charles and negotiated his peaceful entry into the city, and it was he whose calming influence narrowly averted a violent confrontation between a nervous population and French troops in the weeks that followed. “O most Christian King,” he addressed Charles, “you are an instrument in the hands of the Lord who has sent you to cure the ills of Italy, as I have long predicted.”
Once Charles’s army departed to pursue dreams of glory in the south of Italy, Florentines set about reconstituting their broken system of government. Savonarola’s moral influence was decisive in the political reforms that followed. In the struggle between the oligarchs and the republicans, he threw his considerable prestige behind the latter, reversing the trend toward an increasingly restrictive franchise that had been underway since the time of the Albizzi. The new government’s boldest innovation was the establishment of a Great Council, drawn from a pool of three thousand eligible citizens whose ancestors had held one of three leading offices, which served as the ultimate legislative authority in the state. This was hardly a true democracy in the modern sense, but through this new body more citizens participated in the government than at almost any time in Florentine history.*
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